Category Archives: Community

If These Walls Could Talk

Classroom Culture, Community, Lisa Dennis, Readers Writers Workshop October 12, 2017 Comments: 10

We spend eight hours a day (Ha! Nine? Ten? Should I just sleep here?) in our classrooms.

Four walls, seating for 30 (Ha! 3img_66735? 78? Does flexible seating come in bunk style these days?), and an endless array of inquisitive minds, needs, and beliefs.

At Three Teachers, we speak with full hearts and buzzing minds about the opportunities that Readers and Writers workshop afford. From choice to challenge, talk to Twitter, and many, many elements in between, we explore, question, wrestle with, and embrace the opportunities that come with relinquishing control over a classroom to instead move together with our students as readers and writers.

As I look around my classroom this year, full of some familiar components (budget-busting classroom library, inspirational posters touting the beauty of words and books, and my space age rolling furniture), I also see evidence of my growth as a workshop teacher.

So, in much the same way that one might suggest that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, the following suggests some of the ideas I’ve collected from great workshop teachers, Twitter searches, fellow colleagues, and my professional reading over the summer to reflect the beliefs of our community and what we value as readers and writers:

img_6116

I’ve completely abandoned any traditional rules in the classroom. On the first day of school, I joke with kids about their vast knowledge of how to “play the game of school.” As long as we can, as high school students, keep from putting gum in each other’s hair, we can focus on the more important “rules” that will guide our philosophy of learning and engagement. These rules from Amy Fast, are referenced each and every day. Mostly rule #2. We need a LOT of work there. 

img_6117. 

I am NOT an artist, by any means. In the past, I’ve let this limit what I try to do when it comes to anchor charts in my room. NO MORE! With a projector and pencil, I am tracing my way to borderline copyright infringement (Don’t worry, I promise not to try and sell them). This beauty comes from the Disrupting Thinking by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst, which rocked my world over the summer. I wanted my students to have a solid reminder of what their books, brains, and hearts mean to their reading. We refer to this chart that I found through Google Images almost daily. 

img_6468

Giving students a place to share what moves them in their reading means we have a constant reminder of the power of words, and motivation to write as we reflect on the great beauty we find through the published word. This reading graffiti poster illustrates the baby steps my students are taking to feel comfortable in sharing what speaks to their hearts and minds while reading. Once I finally broke the seal and put a quote up myself (Thank you, as ever, Patrick Ness), students have added insights such as “When you tell a lie, you steal a man’s right to the truth” and “You can’t take it with you, right?!”I love the brave souls who are sharing their reading lives with us without even being asked. 

The back wall is a revolving homage to mentor text study. Early in the year, my sophomores started their study of narrative by emulating Kelly Norman Ellis’s poem “Raised by Women.” These days, creations from my AP Language students grace the walls. They utilized authentic informative writing in the creation of biographies modeled after the work of James Gulliver Hancock in Artists, Writers, Thinkers, Dreamers.

img_6685

In the space behind my desk, I have inspirational words that help frame my work each day, provided by people that I love and respect. I have pictures of my family, notes of gratitude from students, and art from my daughter Ellie. I am a firm believer that as a reader and a writer in the room, my story matters too. I love to share with students how the belief that we can always improve, grow in reflection, and benefit from a positive attitude, can shape their experience in English class each day. 

Our classrooms, both full of students, and basically empty, suggest who we are as teachers. I love what mine says about the work we do everyday in the workshop.

What does your classroom say about your workshop journey? Please share in the comments below!

 

Lisa Dennis teaches English and leads a department of incredible English educators at Franklin High School near Milwaukee. One of her classroom walls is painted in a burnt orange color. It’s fall all year. Follow Lisa on Twitter @LDennibaum 

5 Lists of Books and More Space for Talk

Amy Rasmussen, AP Language, Classroom Culture, Classroom Library, Talk October 10, 2017 Comments: 18

I am a collector. I collect bookmarks I don’t use and tweets with headlines I think I’ll read later. I collect cute little pots I think I’ll eventually make home to plants, and notebooks I’m afraid to mess up with a pen (from my pen collection, of course.)

I also collect lists. Doesn’t everyone?

I collect lists of books thinking this will keep me from buying more books. Sometimes it works. Not often.

We’ve shared several lists of books on this blog:  Coach Moore’s list of books he read this summer, Shana’s Summer Reads to Stay Up Late With, Amy E’s Refresh the Recommended Reading List, and Lisa’s Going Broke List just to name a few.

I like reading lists about books. This helps me stay current on what my students might find interesting or useful. Often, I find titles that help me find the just right book for that one students who confuses “reading is boring” with “I don’t read well,” or “I don’t know what I like to read.”

With one heartbreaking event after another in our country lately, I keep thinking about the importance of reading to help our young people grow into compassionate citizens who more easily understand their world. Did you see the results of yet another study? Reading makes you feel more empathy for others, researchers discover.

Of course, we don’t need another study to tell us this. Many of us see it in our students.

I see it in my students. My students who enjoy reading also enjoy talking about their

Bookclubdiscussion

My students chose from nine different books for their book clubs. Once they chose, we had five different book clubs happening in one class. At the end of our second discussion day, I had students combine groups and talk with one another about the major themes, make connections, and share a bit about their author’s style.

reading. They relate to one another more naturally as they talk about their books, the characters, the connections. They welcome conversations that allow them to express their opinions, likes and dislikes. They learn much more than reading skills through these conversations.

My AP Language students recently finished their first book club books. I left them largely without a structured approach to talking about their reading. My only challenge on their first discussion day was to stay on topic:  keep the conversation about the book for 30 minutes. They did. I wandered the room, listening in as I checked the reading progress of each student.

On the final discussion day (three total), I reviewed question types and used ideas from Margaret Lopez’ guest post Saying Something, Not Just Anything, and asked students to write two of each question types:  factual, inductive, analytical prior to their book club discussions. This led to even richer conversations around their reading.

I remember reading a long while ago about how conversations about poetry could invite opportunities for solving big problems. I don’t know if this is the article I read, but the poet interviewed in this article asserts it, too:

I think we know the world needs changing. Things are going awry left and right. I firmly believe that in our very practical, technological, and scientific age, the values of all the arts, but of poetry in particular, are necessary for moving the world forward. I’m talking about things like compassion, empathy, permeability, interconnection, and the recognition of how important it is to allow uncertainty in our lives.

. . .Poetry is about the clarities that you find when you don’t simplify. They’re about complexity, nuance, subtlety. Poems also create larger fields of possibilities. The imagination is limitless, so even when a person is confronted with an unchangeable outer circumstance, one thing poems give you is there is always a changeability, a malleability, of inner circumstance. That’s the beginning of freedom.

When we invite our students to read, and then open spaces for them to talk about their

bookclubdiscussion2

This group had hearty discussions around Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. It’s Western Days. They don’t always wear hats and plaid and boots, even in Texas.

reading, we provide the same opportunities that discussions around poetry do. Maybe not on the micro scale of ambiguity and nuance, but most certainly on the macro scale of possibilities. Our students are social creatures, and we must give them spaces to talk.

So I collect lists of books I think my students may like to read, with the hope of engaging them in conversations — with me and with one another — around books. (A couple of years ago, Shana and I had students create book lists as part of their midterm.)

Here’s five of the book lists I’ve read lately. Maybe you will find them useful as you curate your classroom libraries and work to find the right books for the right students, so they can have the conversations that help them grow in the empathy and understanding we need in our future leaders, right or left.

6 YA Books that are Great for Adults

50 Books from the Past 50 Years Everyone Should Read at Least Once

The Bluford Series — Audiobooks

20 Books for Older Teen Reluctant Readers

43 Books to Read Before They are Movies

Oh, and if you haven’t read Lisa’s 10 Things Worth Sharing Right Now post in a while, now, that’s an awesome list!!

Amy Rasmussen loves to read, watch movies with her husband, and tickle her five grandchildren. She’s in the market for a lake house and likes to shop thrift stores for books and bargain furniture. Someday she’ll be disciplined enough to write a book about teaching. For now, she teaches senior English and AP Lang and Comp at her favorite high school in North TX. Follow Amy on Twitter @amyrass, and, please, go ahead and follow this blog.

Shifting Control to Invite More Learning

Amy Rasmussen, AP English, AP Language, Classroom Culture, Readers Writers Workshop, Student Projects, Technology October 4, 2017 Comments: 6

569059I admit to liking control. I won’t go far as to say I’m a control freak, but I am freakishly close. As I age I realize I like more and more things in neat little rows, even my To-Do lists must be lined up perfectly, so I can make tiny check marks with my Precision pen.

I am ridiculous.

The hardest part of teaching for me is letting go. It’s also been the best thing for my teaching.

To be an effective workshop teacher, we step aside so our students can step in. They want to know their opinions, ideas, and choices matter. They’re hungry for it. We’ve written a lot about choice reading on this blog, and I know many of us advocate for self-selected independent reading, protecting sacred reading time like an O line protecting our quarterbacks.

I wonder what other choices we offer our students. How else do we invite them to own their learning?

Recently, I read this post “The Inspiration in Front of Your Eyes” by George Couros. He begins:

Often when working with educators, I try to give relevant examples of ideas that can be implemented into learning but get very specific to either a class or grade level.  My focus is not adding something to the plate of an educator but replacing something they currently do with something new and better than what they may have been doing before.  For example, instead of a teacher spending hours searching a video to explain a concept in math, or even creating it themselves, why not have the students find the concept and say why it is powerful, or having the students create some form of multimedia to explain the concept themselves? The flip is putting the learning into the student’s hands, which can lessen the work for the educator.

Deeper learning for the student, less work for the teacher.  Sounds good to me!

Couros goes on to explain the importance of being observant and connecting ideas we find in the world, and reshaping them to facilitate deeper learning for our students. Of course, this resonated. This is how we find mentor texts like author bios and user manuals. But Mr. Couros got me thinking about shifting the finding to my students.

Then before school a week ago Monday, I saw Kristen Ziemke‘s Padlet, Take a Knee. And I got another spark to shift my instruction.

I’d never used Padlet before, so while my students shuffled in to first period, I quickly made an account and created a board. I put one thing on it:  Kwame Alexander’s poem, Take a Knee, which I knew was the perfect quickwrite for the day after so many NFL players knelt in protest.

After we wrote and shared and talked in small groups and as a class about the issue. One student said, “I just don’t know enough about it to know what I believe.”

The perfect intro!

I suggested we make a text set that could help us understand the why’s and who’s and what’s of this hotbed of a topic, and I issued the challenge:  As a class of individuals with a wide variety of beliefs and backgrounds, we’d search for articles that would address all sides. We’d use Padlet as our storage space. Then we’d use the text set we build together for our learning in class.

With their phones and iPads, students went to work, and in the 10 minutes I gave them in class, they talked. Students talked about where to find information that “wasn’t biased,” “would tell them the truth,” “will help me want to know more.”

I leaned in to these conversations, teaching terms, suggesting sites, encouraging objectivity — and why it is important for our understanding of human needs and desires.

Our Padlet What’s the Argument is not complete. We haven’t had a chance to return to it yet, but we will. Maybe we’ll use it as we learn to ask better questions in preparation for whole class discussions. Maybe we’ll use it as we learn to synthesize information from a variety of sources. Maybe we’ll use it to spark ideas for the arguments we’ll post on our blogs. It doesn’t matter.

When we return to our Padlet, or even create another one that coincides with whatever peace-cannot-be-kept-by-force-it-can-only-be-achieved-by-understandinghotbed topic fires up the nation (sadly, there are so many), my students will know I value their input. They’ll know that helping them make sense of our world is as important to me as helping them love books and become good writers.

And maybe they’ll remember to look at all sides of the issues, to see into the hearts and minds of those we may disagree with so we can find a space for conversations.

If my giving up control makes space for that, I’ll take it every chance I get.

What ideas to do have to flip the learning into students’ hands, let go of control, and invite deeper learning? Please share in the comments.

Amy Rasmussen is a neat freak in her classroom but not her bedroom closet. She loves sharing books with student readers and reading students’ writing. She is the mother of six, grandmother to five, and wife to one very patient man. She teaches senior English and AP English Language at a huge and lovely senior high school in North Texas. Follow her on Twitter @amyrass

On Substitutes in a RWWorkshop Classroom

Amy Rasmussen, Classroom Culture, Community, Readers Writers Workshop September 26, 2017 1 Comment

We’ve all been there:

tweet by Mr Minor

If you don’t follow @MisterMinor, you’re missing out. He’s a master teacher, and a master at gifs. No justice in this screenshot.

We carefully craft lesson plans, sometimes with step-by-step instructions, and descriptions of each students’ temperament scrawled in the margins of our rosters; sometimes leaving flow charts to indicate transitions from activity to activity, hoping if are meticulous in our details, and we leave a timer, and sternly warn our students: “Be on your best behavior,” even just a bit of reading and writing will happen when we need a substitute.

When I first started teaching, it rarely did.

I’d never thought to write about a workshop classroom in the hands of a substitute until I got an email from a 2nd year teacher who is newly implementing workshop in her sophomore English classes. Just so happens I got her email the same day I saw Mr. Minor’s tweet.

My new friend wrote:  “How do you approach substitute plans? Do you chalk it up as a loss? Do you leave detailed plans with the idea that once students have developed routines, they should still be able to follow them with another adult in the room?”

If you know me, you know I never chalk anything up to a loss — even in the days when my precise plans didn’t work, I tried to save the day.

Sometimes it depends on the substitute. Just like pretty much everything, some are better than others. Sometimes we are just grateful someone picked up the call. Sometimes our substitutes are used to being left with crowd control, so they think that’s the job.

I speak from several years experience. When I returned to college to finish my degree, I substituted at my children’s high school. I loved the teachers who left me detailed plans, the teachers who held their students accountable for being on task when they were not physically in the classroom. I could always tell the teachers who had established rapport with their students, built relationships of trust, practiced routines, and set expectations for completing work while they were out. I substituted for five years –about half of the teachers I subbed for fit this category of awesome.

Effective workshop teachers are these teachers. Of course, I didn’t know what a workshop pedagogy was back then, and I never subbed in a readers-writers workshop classroom, but the culture in the classroom is the same.

When our students “buy-in” to the community we create around reading and writing everyday, they are more likely to be on task when we leave them in the care of a substitute teacher. Some classes can even facilitate the workshop themselves.

Here’s my tips for leaving instructions for your substitute teachers:

1.Encourage substitutes to stick to your routines. For example, my students read for 15 minutes at the beginning of every class period. I ask my substitute to monitor this sacred reading time by walking the room and when necessary waking up the sleepers, and asking the phone-addicted to put away their devices. (I have to do this everyday myself. Some teens can be so slippery.) And depending on my students’ stamina, sometimes I ask my sub to double the reading time. Many students thank me for it.

  1. Invite substitute teachers to share their reading lives. This is a good fill in for a planned book talk. Ask them to take five minutes and share their favorite books. If they don’t have favorites (sad but sometimes true), ask them to instruct your students to turn and talk about their books, maybe with focused ideas like “Describe the main character,” or “Imagine your book was being made into a new movie, who would be cast as the characters?” I’ve had substitutes borrow books from my classroom library. They’ve left me notes  — and usually bring the books back, eventually.

  2. Invite substitutes to write with your students. Leave a favorite poem or short passage, or if the substitute has access to technology, a video clip that students can read or watch and write a response to. Of course, this ties back to routines. My students and I write almost every day. Sometimes our quickwrites spark ideas for further writing. Sometimes they spark thinking about a topic we’ll explore in a longer reading task. I’ve had some substitutes love writing what my students write. These are the ones I want again.

  3. Trust substitute teachers to facilitate your workshop. Maybe they cannot teach a mini-lesson, but they can give students a reading passage to read and discuss in small groups. They can give students a handout with a short writing task and prompt a discussion around topics students may choose to write about. If we’ve taught our students how workshop works, they will know what to do, even if the substitute is unsure.

  4. Follow up with your students when you get back. This has made the biggest difference in my students staying on task when I am out. If they know I will hold them accountable for the workshop the day before, they are more apt to not take a vacation day when I am gone.

Having a successful substitute experience all comes back to our community. If we’ve built a culture of readers and writers working together to reach individual goals, we can trust our students will keep on learning without us for a day or two.

Go ahead. Take a break if you need it.

How do you ensure learning in your workshop classroom when you leave your students with a substitute? Please share in the comments.

Like every teacher she knows, Amy Rasmussen lives tired. Leaving feedback for student writers, and reading books to share with teen readers, keeps her up way too late. Add in her 5:30 am workout, and no wonder she’s beat. Amy teaches senior English and AP Language at the home of the Fighting Farmers in North Texas. When she’s not yawning, she’s attending her grandson’s baseball games, trying to quit her online shopping addiction, and writing on this blog. Follow Amy on Twitter @amyrass & @3TeachersTalk; and please join the conversation over on Facebook at Three Teachers Talk.

 

 

Building Community Through Tough Conversations

Classroom Culture, Community, Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes, Talk September 25, 2017 1 Comment

We need to invite conversation into our classrooms, and sometimes that means having controversial conversations. Provocative topics will get anyone talking–we’ve all seen evidence of this in our Facebook feeds–but teens, especially, need to flex their opinion muscles often.

Like any other developmental milestone, kids need a safe place to practice and fail at these skills before they master them. Talk, argument, the subtle art of making claims, supporting them with evidence, and persuading listeners with ethos, pathos, and logos, are developmental milestones. As such, it is our job as educators to provide the safe space needed for that practice.

But as we know, you can’t just leap into the tough conversations a few weeks into the school year–you have to build community, and trust, and a sense of values first.

img_2578Right?

I happen to think that having those tough conversations is the way to build community.

We have to read, think, and write what matters in classrooms. So last Friday, my preservice teachers and I unpacked a tough topic: institutional racism in education. We didn’t just leap in and invite uninformed debate–instead, we did lots of work before our conversation to help us navigate the waters we were about to enter.

First, we read.  Our assigned reading for the week was Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” A women’s studies scholar, McIntosh coined the term “privilege” in the late 80s, when this article was published. It’s a thoughtful read, strengthened by its narrative of McIntosh’s discovery about her previously-unseen privilege.

We drafted our thinking in pairs. After reading, students wrote one-pagers about their thinking and submitted them to our class Google Drive. Each student has a critical friend this semester, so they receive feedback on their thinking from both me and a peer. These low-stakes spaces for thinking help students get their initial reactions down on paper

Screen Shot 2017-09-25 at 8.27.30 AM.png

We talked. To open our conversation, I asked students to speak generally about what surprised or interested them about McIntosh’s writing. Many students volunteered ways in which they agreed with McIntosh, but a brave few spoke about how they weren’t so sure about her claims. One student even prefaced his comments with, “I feel like kind of a douchebag for even thinking this, but I’m going to say it.” I thanked him for his willingness to be honest, and that opened the floodgates for other students to share more readily.

We extended and re-drafted our thinking. After several minutes of back-and-forth, I presented students with a variety of other points of view on this same topic in the form of quotes about institutional racism and white privilege. I asked students to read and respond to one quote anonymously via Post-its.

img_2517

They did this, then passed their Post-it laden quote to the next table, who read both the quotes and comments and added their thinking.

img_2577

We continued in this vein, then talked in small groups about what the post-its said, negotiating agreement or disagreement with each writer, then conversing about the ways our own opinions had evolved.

We left the conversation unfinished. Because how can you really ever arrive at a definitive understanding of any topic so complex? Our thinking must keep evolving. I have several next steps in mind.

I’m going to send my kids Peggy McIntosh’s fantastic TED Talk on how studying privilege systems strengthens compassion. They’ll respond to their critical friend’s comments. In their notebooks, they’ll write a bit more about how they see evidence of institutional racism in the schools in which they observe. Next class, we’ll discuss ways to enact actionable change in classrooms, using this topic as a starting point for something we may want to reform in education.

In just our third class meeting, our conversation was a good start to the kinds of deep thinking and grappling with issues I want students doing in the course of our two years of seminars together. By offering plenty of opportunities to draft and revise thinking in small-group and low-stakes ways, students got comfortable enough with their thinking to share it with the class thoughtfully and respectfully.

We’ll continue to dialogue about this topic and other difficult ones, revising our thinking through the lenses of our learning and experiences, and discuss why discussing these topics matters. In just this one class meeting, my students and I learned more about one another than we had in our previous weeks of just writing and talking about safer topics. Through reasonable risk-taking, vulnerability, and honesty, we grew not only as individual thinkers and teachers, but as a community of reflective practitioners as well.

How do you help your students have controversial conversations? Please share in the comments!

Shana Karnes is mom to 1.5 spunky little girls and wife to a hardworking surgical resident.  She teaches practicing and preservice English teachers at West Virginia University and is fueled by coffee, tortilla chips (this week), and a real obsession with all things reading and writing.  Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader and read more of her writing on the WVCTE Best Practices blog.

#TwitterTeacher

AP English, AP Language, Community, Lisa Dennis, Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop, Social Networking, Technology, Twitter September 21, 2017 Comments: 6

I’m late to the party. This I know. But my enthusiasm for this soirée is genuine, and it fueled some of my first day success.

In an effort to build community as quickly as possible this school year, and to get to know our students a bit over the summer, my colleague Sarah Sterbin and I decided to add some technological play to our AP Language summer homework. Using the hashtag #fhslanglife, students were asked to share their reading life twitter4throughout the summer.

They could snap photos of their trips to the bookstore, their feet in the sand and a book in their hands, and their smiling faces reading the summer away.

They could quip about quotes from required and choice reading, make suggestions to peers on what to read next, comment on the insights of others, follow my reading adventures, and the list goes on.

As often happens with open ended assignments, we got a wide variety of participation. Tweets ebbed and flowed throughout the summer, but each time a student posted, I made it a priority to comment, retweet, like, and/or tag an author to promote connections across the world of reading. When Ishmael Beah, Allen Eskens, and Matthew Desmond interact with your students over the summer, I call that a solid win for starting to build readers and a community with enthusiasm around reading.

twitter5

On the very first day of school, and in the few days that followed, as we quickly collected summer work, set down to work with a quick writes, set up writers’ notebooks, organized editorial speeches for our first speaking opportunity, and took in the surroundings of our room, I asked students to use our hashtag to share their excitement about the work ahead. I love what they chose to share.

twitter3twitter1twitter 2twitter6

Tweeting is a quick and easy way to build community. I sometimes display current tweets our daily PowerPoint/Syllabus to keep the movement afoot, and I love to hear students’ reactions as they come in the room to see their humor, insights, and recommendations on the big screen.

Twitter

How do you use social media to promote reading and writing lives? Please leave your brilliant ideas in the comments below!

Lisa Dennis teaches English and leads a department of incredible English educators at Franklin High School near Milwaukee. Her latest tweet suggests that she thinks about reading 24/7. Follow Lisa on Twitter @LDennibaum 

Inviting Controversy, and Often

Amy Rasmussen, AP English, AP Language, Classroom Culture, Readers Writers Workshop, Talk September 19, 2017 Comments: 12

“If you could, keep any type of content that has to do with race and gender possibly politics out of any classroom discussion, videos, papersor anything of that sort. Its very controversial. . . It’s very debatable , especially when we have different values/ethics on subjects .”

If you can look past all the errors, perhaps you can see why this student’s message cut into my brain a bit. I invite open dialogue, so that a student felt comfortable emailing me with such a request took some of the edge off. Some. Of. It.

But really?!

Once my heart slowed a bit, and I got over the audacity of this child (Can you even imagine telling a teacher what is and is not appropriate to discuss in class?) I realized one important thing:  I am right on target.

Hard TopicsIf we do not discuss the hard topics in our classes, where will students ever learn to discuss the hard topics? Sure, we can hope they debate social, economic, and political issues in their homes, but we know many families do not have meals together much less conversations. And it’s the conversations, varied and diverse, that can help us view the world in a different light — sometimes a cleaner, clearer, more empathetic and compassionate light. I think we need more of this light.

Here’s part of my response:

I appreciate your concern about controversial topics; however, English is a humanities class, and as such, we should learn about the humanities. That means all the messy topics that make us human. We should invite controversial topics into the classroom. The classroom becomes a microcosm of the world outside of school. If we cannot learn to discuss and debate in polite conversation here, how can we expect to ever discuss and debate politely as adults?

I see it as my job to be sure we think and feel and share as individuals with diverse backgrounds, cultures, and interests. I will continue to use texts, including poems, that give us voice to our lives and thinking.

Side note:  The poems in question were ones I shared as quickwrite prompts to spark thinking for the college application essays students would soon begin writing, “Raised by Women” by Kelly Norman Ellis and “Facts about Myself” by Tucker Bryant. I still don’t see the controversy.

Yesterday I saw a post on a Facebook group I follow where ELA teachers often ask for help. One person posted:  “One of my students challenged me today to include more literature that is relevant to what they are seeing in the world right now. . . What should I include?”

I refrained from responding:  EVERYTHING in my Twitter feed.

We all know the importance of helping students see the relevance in the texts we study, and I don’t know the context of that student’s request, but I wonder if sometimes students believe relevance means:  reflects what I already believe and feel, instead of: often challenges what I already think and feel.

Maybe we need to do a better job of explaining why we must challenge our own beliefs, get out of our echo chambers, and at least acknowledge the opinions of those who differ from our own.

Maybe I failed my student because I didn’t explain enough at the get go.

Today he got his schedule changed. Right after I found this infographic, an argument for the humanities.

We’ll study it in class real soon — after we discuss Jared Kushner’s Harvard Admissions Essay and finish writing our own. (See what I did there?) Then we’ll brainstorm the most debatable topics we can think of — DACA, Black Lives Matter, Confederate monuments, everything A Handmaid’s Tale, gender rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and more rights– and engage in the critical, and oh, so vital discussions that help us understand what it means to be human.

How do you invite these critical conversations into your classroom instruction? Please share in the comments.

Amy Rasmussen is a trouble-maker. Tell her not to do something, and she will do it — especially if it leads to expanding the minds and improving the learning experiences of today’s youth. She teaches Humanities/AP Language and Composition and senior English at a large, diverse, and truly wonderful high school in North TX. Her hobbies are searching for controversial topics that spark debate, reading and sharing banned books, and challenging the status quo. And she loves the readers of this blog. Follow Amy on Twitter @amyrass and @3TeachersTalk; and please join the conversation over on Facebook at Three Teachers Talk.

Build It Brick by Brick

Community, Lisa Dennis, Readers Writers Workshop September 14, 2017 Comments: 6

In a sea of back-to-school positivity (well-founded) and hoopla (well-intentioned), I often feel overwhelmed and ill-prepared.

Blame a jam-packed teacher preparation week, a summer of mindfulness that limited a deep dive into my lesson plan book, procrastination, denial, or crippling avoidance in the face of too many awesome options. I’m stressed out. Already. And tired.

Honestly, most of it is that last option. I do pretty constantly think about teaching. Ways to improve my content base, opportunities to more deeply understand my students, and countless resources to pour through in order to refine lessons all populate my summer.foolish How then does it all seem to come crashing down so quickly? Where does that raw enthusiasm for “the new” become wide-eyed, survival-mode, toss-me-a-life-jacket exhaustion?

It reminds me of those early days of parenthood. When you are “supposed” to feel overwhelming joy and revel in the breathless beauty that is a new and precious life, but few (if any) people prepare you for just how emotionally and psychologically challenging the change can be. When compounded with minimal sleep, mounds of self-applied pressure to be brilliant, and the feeling that every decision is make or break, you’re never very far from the edge.

So, just as parents want little more in those early days than to do right by their kids, teachers want to start the year by forging relationships, making connections, and presenting students with opportunities to learn that they can’t refuse. We want to learn their names, find them the best books, spark their enthusiasm with the perfect discussion question, change a life with the first kind smile. I’m a bit tired just typing it. However, stop someone on the street and say, “This new school year has me exhausted already,” and I would imagine they would be tempted to remind you of June, July, and August. But, the struggle is real.

I’m here this morning with a quick reminder. A reminder that I too need to hear as I furiously capture moments of a student bio gallery walk to share on Twitter, check in scads of summer homework, collaborate on new curriculum with multiple colleagues, adjust to a new schedule, less sleep, and more stress:

Rome wasn’t build in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour. 

Our work at the start of the year is certainly important. It’s foundational. That said, it doesn’t matter if it’s year one or year thirty-seven, remember to breath, remember to rest, and remember that our students are overwhelmed at the start of the year too. They need a bit of ease, understanding, and comforting as much as we might.

Epictetus once said, “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” I might add that one should be content to be exhausted as well, but loving students is exhausting. Most things that we truly value demand much more from us and are thereby far more valuable in the end.

Hang in there, friends. We’re in this together, and the mission is worth every ounce of weary we might be feeling.

Lisa Dennis teaches English and leads a department of incredible English educators at Franklin High School near Milwaukee. She currently misses long afternoon naps, but squeezes in catnaps here and there, on her couch, under a book, and with her eyes open during stoplight stops. Follow Lisa on Twitter @LDennibaum 

Diving In: My 1st Week of Readers/Writers Workshop – A Guest Post by Gail Stevens

Community, Guest Post, Logistics, Readers Writers Workshop September 13, 2017 Comments: 5

September 4, 2017

School started for me last Monday, and with it my journey into Reading Writing Workshop.  Lucky for me I have three colleagues who were ready to try something new, too.  Why try Workshop? So many of our students were not reading. They were Screen Shot 2017-05-01 at 8.44.22 PMdisengaged, and so were we. We were feeling  discouraged and something had to give.

At the end of the school year, we invited anyone in our English department who was interested  to join us to discuss the possibility of implementing Reading Writing Workshop. Attendees discussed why we wanted to try this method, and teachers had time to ask questions and voice their concerns. We left that meeting feeling excited and energized by what could be,  and committed to reading and studying about Workshop over our break.

Over the summer, we read Penny Kittle’s Book Love, participated in the Book Love Summer Book Club, and read everything we could get our hands on about the ins and outs of running a workshop in the high school classroom.

Fast forward to last week. With summer over we met back at school to figure out how this workshop thing was going to actually look in our classrooms. We quickly realized that we needed to make peace with being uncomfortable and tolerating the ambiguity that comes with the territory of trying something radically new. We are pioneers, and we have each other and a host of mentors online via Twitter and some amazing professional blogs like this one to guide us in our first steps.

The Three Teachers Talk blog has been a godsend to us. Every day there are thoughtful articles, engaging lessons, and practical tips on doing workshop from real teachers who are teaching real students. The authenticity of this work shines through every post as well as the encouragement we get from teachers who are doing what we aspire to do.

So how’s it going so far?

AMAZING!

We just finished our first full week with students and the four of us are feeling so energized and excited about our first starts at establishing workshop classrooms. Some background on the range of classes we are teaching this year:  I am teaching four year-long sections of English II Honors (on an A/B day schedule). All of my students are also takingAP Seminar, the first AP class in theAP Capstone program. Capstone is new to our school this year, so again, more new territory for us as teachers. I work closely with my students’ AP Seminar teachers and my plan is to support the work my students do in that class in whatever way I can. I also co-teach one section of ESL Sheltered English I. My workshop colleagues are teaching English III & English IV inclusion and honors sections. Here are some of the reading/writing activities we used to begin establishing community in our classrooms:

Day 1 was  “Book Speed Dating” in the Media Center. Students had a chance to “speed date” at different tables (each table was set up with different fiction genres). All students left with a book that day.  We wanted students reading from Day 1.

Day 2 Students began their independent reading at the start of class.  Students read for 10 minutes and recorded the number of pages.  Next, they filled out their Independent Reading Record sheets to calculate their weekly reading goals (using Penny Kittle’s formula). We will use these records when we confer with students to help them design their reading ladders and to guide choices for next books.

workshop one

Students also completed aReading History Timeline. This is something I’ve used before but haven’t done in a while. I like seeing a visual timeline of my students’ literacy development. Students were supposed to choose 8-10 events that helped shape their reading lives. Positive events were to be placed above the line; negative events below the line (some students forgot this part, so I had to have them clarify for me). Students placed their completed timelines on their desks and we did a gallery walk. Afterwards, we discussed common themes, beloved books, shared experiences with literacy. One common theme was students’ loss of interest in reading as their lives have become busier. Almost all mentioned a lack of time to read as being a major contributor to this problem. This only reinforces my belief that if we intend to help students grow as readers, we must give them time to read in class.

workshop two

workshop three

Day 3 we created aPersonal User Manual. I  loved the idea of students writing guides to what matters to them. I shared the mentor text, and then wrote my own User Manual to share with students. I explained to them that I would be doing all of the writing assignments (and setting my own reading goals) with them. They loved this idea!

I am only halfway through reading my students’ Personal User Manuals, but so far I am thrilled with the results. Notice the voice that is evident in their work. This is such a great beginning to the year to be able to identify a student’s voice and encourage it right from the start.

What insights I have gotten into my students after only the first week of class!

Here are some student samples:

workshop four
workshop five
workshop six

All of these activities helped us to get to know each other as well as build community and excitement for books and writing from day one. A great example: even my most skeptical student, a young man I taught last year in English I, found a book he was willing to read. This is the message I received from him this morning that made my day:

workshop seven

What’s next? Students will be experimenting with writingAuthor’s Bios. I plan to have them include their picture with their bio, and I will print these out and post around the room.

Student response to these first steps into establishing a Reading Writing Workshop have been overwhelmingly positive so far.

Thank you Amy Rasmussen andThree Teachers Talk,Penny Kittle, and all of the amazing Workshop teachers out there who generously share their work and enthusiasm for this practice. My colleagues and I are encouraged by the changes we see in our students and ourselves, as we are more engaged and energized than we’ve been in a long time. We hope to inspire others around us who are curious about workshop but are not ready to take that next step.

I look forward to sharing more adventures in Workshop with you.

Gail Stevens

Gail Stevens teaches 10th grade Honors English & 9/10 ESL Sheltered English at Cary High School, in Cary, North Carolina. This is her 18th year teaching, third in high school, after teaching middle school for 15 years. You can email her at gstevens@wcpss.net or follow her on Twitter @jerseygirl_1021.

Screen Shot 2017-05-01 at 8.44.22 PM

Care to join the conversation? We’d love to add your voice! Please email guest post ideas to Lisadennibaum@gmail.com.

3 Ideas for Better Book Talks

Amy Rasmussen, AP Language, Book Trailers, Books, Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop September 12, 2017 Comments: 3

I should have written this post yesterday. Yesterday was 9/11, and I always try to incorporate some lesson about the events, emotions, and effects of that day into whatever our focus is in class. It’s important we always remember.

My students are juniors and seniors. 9/11 is history to them, and few of my students like to read historical fiction. They choose YA off of my “Teen Angst,” “There Might Be Kissing,” and “You Just Can’t Get Over It” shelves most often. (I suppose most of the books I book talked today fit in that last category though. I’ll be moving a few later.)

Without really meaning to, I shared three books with students on Monday in three different ways. Thus, the idea for this post on engaging students in reading by mixing up our book talks.

  1. Read a poignant, exciting, or particularly intriguing passage from a book.

Over the weekend, I read The Memory of Things by Gae Polisner. I found this a touching story about love and loss and resilience — all topics my students can relate to. What does it mean to be responsible? How do we fight our fears and struggle through the tragedies that terrify us?

In my book talk, I spoke about the characters in the book:  a young man trying to prove his worth to his dad, and a young woman who we learn is in conflict with hers — both struggling with the realities in NYC on the tragic Tuesday of 9/11.

I read the first few paragraphs aloud:

“I move with the crowd, away from downtown Manhattan.

We travel swiftly but don’t run, panicked but steady, a molten lava flow of bodies across the bridge.

A crash of thunder erupts–another explosion?–and the flow startles and quickens. Someone near me starts to cry, a choked, gasping sound, soon muted by a new wail of sirens rising at my back.

I stop and turn, stare frozen. People rush past me:  faces twisted with shock and fear, mouths held open in O’s, others only eyes where their noses and mouths have been covered with knotted sleeves against the toxic, burning reek.

I search fro Kristen or Kelly, or Mr. Bell, but I lost them all as soon as we got to the bridge.

I don’t see anyone I know from school.

I don’t see anyone I know.

I press my sleeve to my nose– Don’t think, Kyle, just move!–but feel stuck gaping at the place where the city has vanished beyond the thick brown wall of smoke.

Two planes have hit, one building is down, and my dad is in their somewhere.”

There’s a lesson in imagery in there I may return to sometime. We are writing narratives right now, so I bookmarked this for later. For now, it’s a good teaser and an effective book talk.

2. Show a movie trailer — but play up on how the book is always better.

My students love videos. They admit to spending their entire lives on YouTube, so any chance I get to show a video clip I take.

If you’ve read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, maybe you feel like I do about the movie:  I loved it, but the book just gives us so much more detail, description, characters, and craft to love. Oh, how I love the craft in this book by Jonathan Safron Foer.

For my book talk, I first flipped through the book, showing student how Foer plays with white space, page markings, and photo essays — all which play into how he develops the plot and constructs meaning. I talked about the parallel plot line and how the movie makers diminish, change even, the important second storyline. I explained how this book taught me more about author’s craft than anything I’ve ever read. Then, I showed the movie trailer.

(Book trailers work as effective book talks, too. You’ll find a bunch here and here and here. We even have a few ideas about book trailers in our archives on this blog.)

  1. Use a passage as a quick write prompt or as a craft study. 

Have you read The Red Bandanna: A Life, a Choice, A Legacy by Tom Rinaldi? Just a few pages in, and your heart will swell.

As I read the books I know I will share with my readers, I mark passages that make me think and feel. Important moves for any reader. I model these moves as I share books and writing ideas with my students. This passage from The Red Bandanna tears me to shreds every time.

The Red Bandana

In my senior English classes, I talked about the heroics of Welles Crowther, the main character in the book, and then students wrote in response to the questions:  What do you carry, what truth could it possibly contain? What meaning could it hold?

In my AP Language class, we talked in our groups about the word choice, the interesting syntax, the tone, and then students wrote their answers to those questions, trying to imitate the writer’s rhythm and descriptive language.

In all my classes, we talked about 9/11, our thoughts, our feelings, and why they matter to the lives we live now. We made connections to texts and to one another as we shared our thinking and our writing. That to me is an added bonus of an effective book talk.

I know my students will read more the more I talk about books. I am the salesperson, and they are the often skeptical customer. I’ve learned that mixing up how I talk about books matters.

And getting students interested in reading pretty much anything these days matters most of all.

Do you have ideas on mixing up our book talks? Please leave your ideas in the comments.

Amy Rasmussen loves to read, watch movies with her husband, and tickle her five grandchildren. She’s in the market for a lake house and likes to shop thrift stores for books and bargain furniture. Someday she’ll be disciplined enough to write a book about teaching. For now, she teaches senior English and AP Lang and Comp at her favorite high school in North TX. Follow Amy on Twitter @amyrass, and please, go ahead and follow this blog.